WHAT IS THE LONGMAN/LANCASTER CORPUS?
The Longman/Lancaster Corpus is a large computerised body of language made up of running text from a wide range of sources. It is 30 million words of written language taken from literature, magazines, papers and more ephemeral materials such as leaflets and packaging. The only global corpus that is carefully constructed to be as representative of written language as possible and a true reflection of twentieth century English, the Longman/Lancaster Corpus offers lexicographers, editors and authors all the information they need to know to write top quality dictionaries and EFL materials. HOW DOES IT HELP? Words can be looked at in the corpus via a concordancing programme. We call up the words we want to examine and the corpus shows us every occurrence of that word in context in its 30 million word databank. Example after example of that word comes up on the screen and from so many examples we are able to deduce a great deal of information about how a word is being used. Take the word hau
